International Higher Education--4/2

In the mid-1990s, the policy debate on higher education has moved to the international arena. Multilateral lending organizations have spurred the debate, as illustrated by the World Bank's 1994 publication, Higher Education: The Lesson of Experience. In addition, UNESCO has been active in promoting international debate through its recent publication, Policy Paper for Change and Development in Higher Education. How do these positions compare in terms of their diagnosis of current problems in higher education and their prescriptions?

The Diagnosis
The starting point for both positions is that higher education today is in crisis. Both papers agree that the current situation is not sustainable in the medium and long term. According to the World Bank, higher education is in crisis throughout the world in terms of: low quality, because of rapid enrollment growth under conditions of limited resources; inefficiency, in terms of inappropriate use of public resources in higher education, high dropout rates, and program duplication; and inequity, because "public subsidies as a proportion of unit costs of higher education often far exceed the subsidies to primary and secondary education." The question of management and institutional leadership stands out as well. There can be no doubt that without serious attention to the institutional level - that is, management, leadership, the use and accountability of public resources, etc.--little progress can be expected in higher education reform.

UNESCO points out three important trends throughout the world: enormous quantitative expansion, which has nonetheless not led to increased equality of access and has not resulted in a proportionally large production of engineers and scientists;1 inadequate diversification of institutions, and academic programs that do not comply with minimum standards and have not led to significant educational innovations; and expansion in an increasingly constrained financial environment, where spending per student has not kept pace with the growing numbers of students enrolled. A paradox becomes evident: developing countries, especially the poorer ones, spend an increasing proportion of their GNP on each student in public higher education than do developed nations. UNESCO states that no country can sustain a viable and differentiated system of higher education on purely public funds.

The Prescriptions
The basic prescriptions made by the World Bank for higher education are:

encouraging institutional differentiation, especially development of the private sector;
diversifying funding sources, including cost-sharing with students and linking government funding closely to performance;
redefining the role of government in its relationships with higher education;
focusing on quality, responsiveness, and equity;
redefining the role of government to ensure a coherent policy framework, create oversight bodies to monitor institutional performance, evaluate funding requests and make relevant information available to the various stakeholders in higher education;
greater reliance on incentives and market-oriented instruments to implement policies; and
increasing management autonomy for public institutions and decentralizing all key management functions (e.g., setting fees, recruiting and retrenching personnel, and using budgetary allocations flexibly across expenditure categories), while holding institutions accountable using sophisticated evaluation criteria.

As for UNESCO's prescriptions, rather than specific recipes for reform, they propose a general platform. The challenge of sustainable development implies that institutions of higher education take a hard look at themselves in terms of their relationships to the economy, their organizational structures, and their funding and spending mechanisms. The principal imperative that nations face today is raising their capacity to adapt to rapid changes in their economic, technological, political, and cultural environments. Developing countries, in particular, face the dual challenges of developing their human resources and reducing existing levels of poverty. UNESCO points to the need to prepare for massive higher education systems of high quality by:

restructuring teaching and research in order to meet the needs of the economy, but also to develop ethical values and a spirit of civic participation in democratic processes;
using public funds efficiently and being held accountable to society through better management, while maintaining the principles of autonomy and academic freedom;
demonstrating the relevance of higher education to society by interacting positively with other levels of the educational system;
developing research in higher education as an indispensable factor in economic development, in raising the quality of higher education in general, and in gaining public respect;
reforming the personnel policies of higher education institutions, with special emphasis on raising the level of competency needed in hiring and promoting teachers;
evaluating secondary school leavers and reforming secondary schools;
investing in institutional infrastructure;
promoting international cooperation in order to support institutions in poor countries, helping to reduce the growing educational and scientific gap between developed and developing nations;
promoting intercultural understanding through increased exchange of teachers, students, and researchers among different countries; and
encouraging critically needed, mutual cooperation to help reverse institutional decay in less developed nations, where institutions must learn the value of effectiveness and of developing closer ties with local communities.

Special emphasis is placed by UNESCO on the issues surrounding government funding for higher education, which is conceived as a long-term investment for society rather than as a burden on public finances. It points out that while funding sources must be diversified, cost-sharing with students has social and political limits, and it warns against excessive commercialization of higher education. UNESCO stresses that given higher education's status as a public good, no substitute will be found in the future for government funding of higher education, and it disapproves of using a limited concept of rates of return to basic and higher education as a guide for funding policies. Therefore, it calls for increased public and private investment that would allow for a renewal of enrollment growth.

A lesson of experience for UNESCO is the significance of institutional diversity for the health of academic communities, for knowledge development, and the preservation of national and local cultural identity. In its experience, the uncritical adoption of models is harmful for higher education, which must strike a balance between the universality of knowledge and the specificity of local needs.

Conclusion
Both these approaches call for an important role for government. In its defense of the long-term role of the state, the World Bank is even more forceful and specific than UNESCO. They concur on the importance of building a policy consensus among the various stakeholders in higher education. Both emphasize the need for institutional reform in higher education, and they agree that autonomy and decentralization are key elements in reform. The question now is not so much "reducing the state and expanding the market" as it is a question of building a more capable state.2

Another shared issue is change at the institutional level. Decentralization, autonomy, and effective management are stressed as essential ingredients of higher education reform. The need to develop more competent and legitimate public institutions in general has been pointed out as intimately connected with economic reform in less developed countries.3

Notes:

Except for countries such as Korea and Taiwan.
Merilee Grindle, Challenging the State: Crisis and Innovation in Latin America and Africa, Harvard Institute for International Development, Cambridge, 1993.
Naim Moises, "Latin America: the Morning After," Foreign Affairs (July/August 1995): 45-61.